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Prosecutors: Mexico politician killed by angry wife

September 21, 2012 | 6:15
pm

MEXICO CITY -- The slaying of a politician that contributed to the fraying of nerves in this troubled country as it prepares for a historic transfer of power had nothing to do with politics and was instead the work of an angry wife, prosecutors said Friday.

The politician, Congressman Jaime Serrano Cedillo, died Sunday after being stabbed while walking down the street in Nezahualcoyotl, a violence-plagued suburb of Mexico City.

Headlines across the country, and around the world, noted that it was the second attack in a 48-hour period to target a member of the soon-to-be-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. The PRI presidential candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, is set to be sworn in Dec. 1.

The earlier killing of a PRI congressman-elect from the border state of Sonora had the hallmark of organized crime: It was a shooting carried out by masked men. But a stabbing is not typically how such dirty business is done here, and officials had hinted that the matter probably was a personal one.

At a news conference Friday, Miguel Angel Contreras, the prosecutor for the state of Mexico, said that Serrano’s wife, Patricia Grimaldo de la Cruz, stabbed Serrano with a kitchen knife after a “profound series of conjugal differences.”

A few days after the stabbing, the Mexican army began patrols of the working-class suburb of Nezahualcoyotl. Officials said that the patrols were not a response to the slaying of Serrano but rather to a general increase in violence.